Whatever Happened To Nathan McKenzie? is a long and complicated novel about the effects of time travel that took my brother four years to write, a sizeable chuck of that time was spent mapping out how everyone met and what happened to them in order to properly manage everybody’s timeline and ensure continuity. I am up to chapter 47 so far with the audio book and have recorded six hours worth. By the end of today my throat was aching and I had to stop because I kept messing up on the last chapter I was doing. There is still quite a long way to go and by teatime I must have been suffering from fatigue as I kept going wrong, reading words that weren’t there or getting names wrong which made me more and more frustrated. I knocked off from work at six o’clock and took Jack to the park.

Jack didn’t seem to want to play with his ball and was content to run around the park sniffing and pissing wherever he smelled another dog, and went into the bushes to have a dump (I think he’s a bit shy) so I didn’t need to clear up after him. Just sitting on the bench watching him cover every inch of the park was relaxing enough for me, and I soon forgot all about deadlines and pressure. I could have sat there all night and I’m sure Jack would have been content to roam for that long.

The enormity of the task of recording Nathan has acted as a wakeup call to how unrealistic my targets were to start with. The pressure is starting to get to me now as I still have a lot to do before I can take my foot off the pedal a bit, especially as most of the projects I am working on involve the Christmas market, which if you’ve been in a greetings card shop you will know has already started.

On the subject of things having already started, the first shoots of Goose Fair have begun to sprout. The goose itself has appeared in its traditional place on the traffic island on Mansfield Road, and today I took this picture.

It’s a start and I am always amazed by how quickly the fair is erected. However this year there is an added air of anticipation hanging over the event as the people of Nottingham are waiting to see if there is an unfortunate repeat of the ‘mushy pea-gate’ scandal that has on two occasions blighted our enjoyment. In 2012 the entire history of the fair nearly came crashing down, last year all was well again and Nottingham’s citizens breathed a sigh of relief as the bowl and ladle for mint sauce had been reinstated. Although we here in Nottingham get very excited for the first weekend in October every year, nobody will be able to relax until Wednesday. You can walk around and soak up the atmosphere during the day but the advertised start time is half past five. The first thing people will be doing this year is checking the (by which I mean the) mushy pea stall to check; bowl and ladle, stay and enjoy the fair, squirty bottle of shop bought mint sauce, more than seven hundred years of Nottingham tradition dies on its arse as everyone goes home and boycotts the event. If I owned one of the rides I’d ask the pea stall people their intentions before bothering to unpack.

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